Gift Exchange

Remember birthday parties where the main entertainment was playing with all the kid's new stuff? Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art must feel that way about the gift they received earlier this year: works from the collection of Don and Carolyn Eason.

The just-opened treasures in "Thirty Years of Collecting: A Recent Gift to the Museum" include approximately 100 funky sculptures and ceramics, bewildering paintings, and stunning prints and photographs, sampling artists from the well-known to the up-and-coming. Before we lost Don Eason in 2005, he and Carolyn told an interviewer that they liked the maverick, the quirky, the slightly off. (Earlier this century, "maverick" wasn't such a tainted word.)